1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to expansion card apparatuses, and more particularly to an expansion card apparatus for connecting an expansion card to a motherboard.
2. Description of Related Art
On a typical motherboard, an I/O (Input/output) chipset controls communications between the CPU and different peripheral components, such as expansion cards, and so on. These different peripheral components often comply with different signal transmission standards, such as PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) standard, PCI-E (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) standard, and so on. However, the I/O chipset can't support every signal transmission standard. For example, if users want to add a PCI-E expansion card to a motherboard whose I/O chipset doesn't support PCI-E standard, a riser card is used to connect the PCI-E expansion card to the motherboard to transform PCI-E signals.
The riser card includes at least an expansion slot on one side thereof, and an edge with a series of signal pads attached thereon. The riser card is mounted upright on the motherboard with the edge inserted in a slot of the motherboard. An expansion card is inserted in the expansion slot of the riser card to indirectly connect to the motherboard, so the expansion card is located parallel to the motherboard. However, if a scale of the expansion card is too large, the expansion card may interfere with other components on the motherboard.
It is therefore desirable to find a new expansion card apparatus which can overcome the above mentioned problems.